Five Tips to Develop a Great Rebounding Team

Even if you don't have an exceptionally strong group of shooters, you can win a lot of games if your team can create a significant rebounding advantage over the opponent. This is an aspect of the game that usually gets some attention, but perhaps not enough considering its impact on game outcomes.

Here are five tips for developing a great rebounding team.

Make it a point of emphasis to praise and reinforce the status of players who do what you are asking them to do in the name of rebounding. In other words, you should strive to create team awareness that rebounding is just as important as scoring. This includes the way you handle newspaper articles about games. Break down into meaningful statistics the impact that rebounding has on the game, and make sure that your team understands clearly the implications rebounding has for winning and losing contests.

Instruct your players in the principles of ball flight and probable rebound direction. Shots from the sides will most likely result in off-side rebound opportunities; shots from relatively straight on will create opportunities in the key; longer shots usually result in rebound opportunities farther away from the hoop, etc.

Instruct your players on the basic box-out stance and the correct floor position. Players should box-out using a wide stance with flexed knees, a straight spine, and arms wide and raised just above the shoulders. They should be between their man and the basket, but not too close to, and especially not under, the hoop.

Instruct your players in techniques to thwart the basic box-out stance. Various feints and rolls can create rebound opportunities that would never occur if your players are passive sitting ducks.

For instance, a jab step to the right followed by a reverse pivot off of the left foot will probably get you around most box-outs. This same move should be practiced using the left foot for the jab step and the right foot for the reverse pivot. Once this technique is mastered, players can be instructed to read the box-out as they start to reverse pivot.

If they feel the box out responding to the reverse pivot, they can cut it short and push off with what was the jab step foot to wedge in front of the box out in the original direction. Simply moving laterally back and forth until gaining enough room to step inside the box-out might be all that your quicker players would need. When stepping through, players should have the arm closet to the box out raised to at least shoulder level to use as an aid in establishing inside position.

In addition, backing away from the contact just enough to cause the player boxing out to search for you opens up opportunities to seize the inside position, too. Any misdirection, even head and shoulder fakes, can help a player get around, or at least in a position to one side or the other, of a box out. Instruction and drill in related footwork and arm positioning is critical.

If your players learn to be relentless in fighting the box out in these ways, they will get far more opportunities for offensive boards!

Reinforce boxing out and defeating the box out using a drill format that encourages intensity, focus, and sustained effort. If your team is going to rebound effectively, this critical muscle-memory has to be cultivated at high speed.

A great rebounding team needs to know the basics, no doubt. But more importantly, the players need to be able to summon fierce intensity and unrelenting focus. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. You have to make it point to include practice time daily to work on building it. You have to follow through with positive strokes for those players who respond to your rebounding instruction.